


The Waiting

by orphan_account



Category: Original Work
Genre: Age Difference, Anxiety, College, Dealing with Self Harm, Drama & Romance, Eventual Romance, Good Friends, Hammocks, High School, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Insecurity, Kissing, Mutual Pining, Party, Romance, Teen Romance, i write to deal with my problems, mentioned - Freeform, mentioned alcohol and drug use, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-01
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-07 12:38:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11059140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: I'm leaving for college soon. I am leaving someone behind. I am too broke to afford a therapist. I needed to work through some stuff. It's romantic and involves a kiss.





	1. Chapter 1

I’ve seen people —  friends —  come and go. I’ve been excited to meet them and horrified when they leave and ecstatic when they visit. It just never felt like I would ever be one of them. Logically, I know I would —  I got good grades and have always been excited to leave this town, move on to bigger and better things. But this is where I belong, where I thrive. It’s hard to imagine me outside of the workshop. When people think of me, the thought immediately proceeding it is about robotics, and I like it that way. I’ve worked so hard to improve it, to leave it better than the way I found it.

Every waking —  and sleeping —  moment for the past six years have gone to it. Hours before and after school, and most of the time, during school, have been dedicated to building and funding my robotics team.

But still, I couldn’t ever picture myself being one of the alumni that people will be excited to see.

So I move on —  I delete folders and try to find a new thing to toss my whole life into.

I hug my friends goodbye time and time again, embracing him for longer and longer. I can't picture my world without him at this point. I think I'm half in love with him, but I'm still not sure if we are even friends. If he even thought of me like that. I still don't know if he noticed when I was gone, or if he missed me when I was absent, or if he worried when I forgot to eat, or if he noticed my haircuts.

I know that I did.

But then I leave. I move on, and away, and I make new friends and take impossibly difficult classes to force myself to forget about him and about that place. I drink and go to parties and try to ignore the fact that drinking always makes me melancholy, which meant I am remembering him and that place. He's undoubtedly making new friends and new memories and breaking new bounds. He's wicked smart and unendingly dedicated and naturally funny and as kind as a high schooler can really be.

But then, as all college freshmen do, I come home for the holidays. I stop in and visit because that’s what good alumni do.

I duck my head into the workshop, bracing myself for the chaos, and am met by shouts of excitement. I yelp, because I always do and because I certainly was not expecting them to be this excited to see me. He runs over, jumping over scrap wood and partially built robot-pieces, to wrap me in a hug.

My heart pounds in surprise and warmth, this boy never ceases to amaze me. He’s more of a man than a boy now, past the normal age-range for his grade. He’s been eighteen for almost as long as me, which was a little horrifying.

I hug him back with the same ferociousness that he hugs me. He pulls away after a long moment, and I survey the room with a judgemental eye. I shrug and make him explain his ideas for that year.

I help him work as he talks me through it, the prototypes and the CAD drawings, and before I know it, my hands are greasy, it has been two hours, and I am back in this, embroiled like I had been for six years.

I pull back a little, hesitant to let myself fall back in. It feels too much like a relapse. I worked really hard to move on. I can't just let myself do this, pretend that nothing has changed. Everything has changed.

I absentmindedly scratch my arm and brush off my worries. I have to leave soon anyway.

My phone buzzes, and I pulled it out to see that it's six —  time for me to leave. I've been here for three hours, so I regretfully say goodbye to everyone and hug him again. I pull away after a firm embrace, but he catches my hand. He asks if he can talk to me. It's quiet in a loud workshop, and we're unusually close together. I find myself nodding without thinking. He smiles, and his eyes wrinkle in happiness. 

We walk to his too-nice car, familiarly navigate the astonishing amount of crap in every seat, and I buckle. He drives quietly to the state park, taking familiar turns. He still drives fast, but less recklessly than he did before. When we park after a brief drive, he grabs a bag from the back —  I have no idea how he knew where it was beneath the miscellaneous bags, boxes, and motors—  and we walk up the dunes to the trees that overlook the water.

He asks if I wanted to hammock. I laugh and agree. It's easy, setting up our hammocks. All of my previous reluctance to pretend nothing has changed flies out the window. We lay here for a while, gently rocking back and forth, listening to music and talking about our sucky classes and stupid people. He tells me he sent his application to the college where I’m attending, and my heart skips a beat. I feel like a terrible person for wanting him to follow me, but I can't help it.

It's fun, but it also sort of hurts.

We’ve been outside for about forty-five minutes when he asks me an unexpected question. “Are you... have you been on any dates?”

I arch my eyebrow in his direction, and say, “I don’t really see how that’s any of your business.”

“We’re friends! Friends dish about this stuff!” He exclaims.

“Are we?” I ask, my heartbeat picking up. “Friends, I mean. Are we actual friends?”

He looks hurt, the corners of his mouth tucking down, his forehead wrinkling. “Of course.”

“Well, in _that_ case,” I drawl. “I suppose I’m _obligated_ to tell you that I’ve been on a few. None of them really stuck. One was really cute. I have a thing for nice hands, and his were big and calloused." He flexes his hands, spreading them on the edge of his hammock. His eyes are fixed on the ground. "He was an idiot, though. He insisted I didn't know what torque was, and he kept trying to take away tools from me in class. Dude didn't even have any mechanical experience." I pause for a second, gauging his reaction. "Truth be told, I’ve got my eye on this dude and I think it’s bogging down my ability to move on. I keep measuring other guys against him and they keep falling short.” I'm looking at him dead in the eye, but he looks away. 

He sits up in his hammock, letting his toes drag on the soft dirt. “That sucks,” he says softly. “But I think I can relate.”

I sit up too, facing him. A blush heats my face, and I push my sweatshirt sleeves up to compensate.

The right cuff drags over a cut on my arm and I hiss. I hadn’t even realized it was there. It's more of a scrape than a cut, but it still startled him out of his spot of relative comfort to examine it.

“This is why we can’t have nice things. You go away to grow up and become an adult, and you come back just as clumsy and careless as before.”

“Hey! I object to that! I’m not careless with anyone!”

“Anyone but yourself,” he scoffs. “Wait —  I’m sorry. I shouldn’t scold you.”

My eyes soften. “It’s okay, little jew. You know very well I’m the same way. I hope you’ve become more careful now that I’m not there to take care of you.”

He chuckles. “You know damn well I haven’t.”

A long moment of silence dragged between us while he takes off his flannel, then his undershirt. I try not to ogle him too much. 

He rebuttons his flannel, and I desperately ignore the way his skin goose bumps from the relative chill. 

He presses his blue undershirt to my arm, staunching the oozing blood. It's still warm.

“So I’m just going to say this. The real reason I brought you out here was to confess to something.”  
  
“Okay...” I say, brow furrowed in confusion.

“I like you. I’ve liked you for a really long time and I’ve been too chicken to say anything.”  
  
I can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t speak. It’s everything I want but... “I can’t.” I blurt out.

He looks heartbroken, and I can't bear it. “Wait —  no, it isn’t that I don’t want too. God, I want to. But I’ve always thought it’s creepy when college students date high schoolers, and I’m only home for a little bit, and long distance sucks, and...”  
  
“Okay, okay. I get it. Bad idea,” he looks so dejected and sad. I reach out and grasp his hand. He takes a breath and squares his shoulders. “Deal time. If I get in —”

“You’ll get in,” I interrupt. There's no doubt in my mind that my school will accept him. He's smarter and better than me in every way. If I can get in, he can get in.

“ _If_ I get in, and _if_ I accept, we’ll revisit the subject.”

I look at him and drink him in, his strong arms and beautiful face. “Will you wait for me?” I ask quietly. I know it isn't fair to ask, especially because I'm the one who's pumping the breaks, but I can't bear the thought of it, of him with another girl while I'm stuck knowing I could've had him.

“Of course,” he scoffs. “Will you wait for me?”

“I’ve been waiting for you for a year and a half,” I admit painfully. “Are you sure about this?”

He nods solemnly.

“Because this is going to suck. It’s been sucking for a long time. And... there’s a lot you don’t know about me. A lot you maybe don’t want to know.”

He looks at me seriously, and it's so rare to see him serious that I know he isn’t faking it. “I want to know everything.”

He opens his mouth again, after a quiet pause, and I know it's to say that we need to leave. I don't want this night to end, so I follow my only instinct.

I twist my injured arm in his grasp until I'm holding his elbow, and I yank him in. His bloody shirt is now pressed between my arm and his side. The blood dried a little, so I noticed when the shirt peeled away from the cut, but I ignore the ache in my arm, instead focusing on the ache in my heart. 

For a moment, it's awkward and a little too wet and our lips don't meet quite right. Until he slides just a little, and we kiss like they do in the movies.

It's still a little wet, and we're both a little overeager, but his lips are soft, and his arms are tight around me.

When we break apart and lean our foreheads together, we take a moment to breathe.

I break the silence first. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have tempted myself. I just... I didn’t want the night to end. I don’t want the waiting to start,” I say. It hurts to give away these truths. I’ve been giving them away all night. It seems like a habit around him, saying uncomfortable things I can't tell anyone else.

He nods in understanding and jerks away from my grasp, tears gathering in his eyes. His shirt falls to the ground, unnoticed.

We take down the hammocks slowly, repacking them in their bags. As we start down the dunes, I grab his shirt and stuff the sleeve in my front pocket. He drives me to my car. We're silent the whole way. I don't give him his shirt back.

The waiting has officially begun.


	2. Chapter 2

I want to say that we talk regularly, but when I go back to school reality hits both of us. It's his senior year, and my freshman year, and we are both incredibly busy.

Until one night, when I get a call so incredibly filled with shrieking that I first think he's being murdered. After a little while, I realize what it is. The fight song of my school. Hopefully _our_ school soon. My heartbeat picks up.

“You got in?” I scream in response.

“HAIL to the victors valiant!” He sings in time with the song.

“I told you so!” I crow, jumping up and down in excitement. The friends around me aren't perturbed by my burst of insanity, but my best friend does look happy. I guess I talk about him more than I thought.

We celebrate for ten minutes until I find the bravery to ask, “Are you going to accept?”

He stays silent. “I want to say yes,” he starts. “But I’m not sure yet. I want to wait, hear back from a couple other places. UChicago is looking really good.”

Part of me is relieved. “Good,” I say firmly. I don't want to be the reason he decides to go to the place he'll be for the next four years. The place he'll go into debt for. I don't want him to choose because of me and hate it. I don't want him to hate me.

Life continues like this. I get relatively good grades in my classes and find a new club to waste my life away on. He gets more and more acceptance letters and scholarships and he calls me every time. It's almost like long distance. We talk a lot, but we also send each other letters and short YouTube videos. I download video games specifically so he can cream me in them. He shows me around the shop, sends me videos of the robot working and the robot failing. We share in each others successes and failures.

I come home for break and we go on almost-dates, where we sometimes kiss and I sometimes cry.

It's a Saturday when he calls me. It's late, and finals are approaching, so I have just begun studying for my calc 2 exams. I desperately answer the phone, welcoming any and all distractions, but especially ones with his name on them.

I can hear his breathing. We sit like that for a solid minute, in silence, until he says, “I put my deposit down today. I’ll be joining you in the fall.”

I start sobbing. I can hear his anxious reassurances through the tinny phone speaker. I breathlessly explain that I'm happy. So painfully happy.

We talk for a half hour until I regretfully told him I need to study. We compromise, deciding that we'll both study together. I quickly Skype him, and we spend a long time muttering equations and shouting our confusions. It's nice, knowing that we are both comfortable around each other. I occasionally help him with his homework, because I'm working on calc 2 while he's working on calc 1, but mostly he's working on AP Physics and I haven't yet taken magnetism, so he complains about the online professor and studies mostly in silence.

I finish finals and travel home, but by that time, he's starting his last round of finals, so it's a week before we see each other.

I get an invitation to his graduation in the mail. It has the logo I designed on the back and I almost cry again.

He's better than me in every way, and I prove that by hoping just a little that he's partially going to our school because of me.

In the time between his last day of school and his graduation, we spend a lot of time together. We both confess to being bad at waiting. I went on a couple dates, mostly with girls. I only kissed one, but I thought of his soft, warm lips and had to break it off.

He admits that he kissed a couple girls, but he's mostly been busy in the shop. “I’m going to miss high school a little,” he says. “But I’m really excited —”

I lean over and kiss him mid-word. It tastes like freedom and relief and mint.

We are back in the state park, but sharing the hammock this time. We lay there, tangled together, kissing softly until well past sunset.

“I love you,” I whisper. His face is flushed, his mouth kiss-swollen, his crow's feet especially pronounced, his eyes wrinkled in happiness. One of his calloused hands rests on my cheek, the other, wrapped around my waist, keeps us tucked together in a hammock meant for one person.

His brown eyes sweep over my face. He leans in the scant few inches between us and kisses me again, gently and quickly. “I love you too.”


	3. Chapter 3

It’s a long time later.

We’ve since broken up, but I think we are both honestly happy about it. Well, as happy as we can be. Dating is a lot of work, and we’re both attending the “best” public university in America, working our asses off to graduate.

So we broke up, after a couple months struggling to make it work. A couple of months later, we found ourselves at the state park again after a semester of not talking. It’s summer, so it’s buggy and colder than we both want it to be.

One of my favorite things about him will always be our comfortable silences. We can sit and not talk for hours, and when we leave it’s like we had spent that whole time talking.

So we both leave with a silent agreement to be friends again. True, actual friends, who talk outside of class and pointedly don’t think about the other’s lips.

It was slow, at first. It still hurt to look at him and remember what we used to be. So at first we just get coffee between classes. We stop avoiding eye contact at the dining hall or our favorite hang-out spots. Then, slowly, we hang out more and more until we find ourselves at this moment.

We find ourselves arguing about the best type of screw because we are both huge, opinionated nerds. I’m arguing for the Bristol, and he’s disagreeing with me mostly for the sake of it. It’s Thursday night, so we don’t have any classes tomorrow, but it’s too early for any parties.

My calfs are on the bed, but my back is on the floor. It’s almost like I’m sitting but in the wrong direction.

His head is next to mine, and while I’m emphatically gesturing at the ceiling, he keeps trying to poke my hands. We’re both laughing at his failures and at my increasingly desperate gesturing.

“Listen —” I laugh. “Dude, you have to just. Look, I just —” I give up. “I promise I have good points! It’s not my fault you’re being too distracting!”

He finally manages to poke the back of my hand and I’m so shocked that I still. He sits up and spins to face me.

“I hope you don’t expect me to get up. I’m rather comfortable.” My hands are still half-raised. I like the way it feels to have gravity push me down in an unusual way. I’m basically looking up his nose in this position though, which is mostly gross.

A brilliant idea crosses my mind. I try to grab for his shoulders, but I can’t quite get my elbow to rotate 180 degrees, so instead, I settle for smacking them. “Idea!” I shout excitedly as I sit up so my stomach is touching my thighs. “Scooch forward!”

He complies, and I flop back down so my head rests in his lap. “Perfect!” I exclaim. I can even rest my arms on his shoulders so I get maximum comfort for minimum effort. When he leans back to rest on his hands I’m not even looking up his nose anymore.

We are still talking an hour later when my roommate gets home. She greets him congenially and flops on her bed, groaning about her stupid required math classes.

“I’m a psychology major! Why do I even need math?” I can tell that he’s going to go off about how everyone needs math, so I’m grateful when she continues. “It’s not even that I don’t like math. It’s that I don’t like that fucking professor! God, he’s so boring. I swear he doesn’t understand what he’s teaching. I asked him to explain how integrals and Riemann sums are related in a normal _fucking_ way and he spent five minutes talking about how Riemann sums were named. I’m going to murder him, or maybe just kill myself.” She says dramatically.

I can tell he notices my deep breath but I ignore him. “You know I would love to help you,” I tell her again. She rolls her eyes and crawls under her bedspread. She’ll be asleep in a couple minutes, so I make him leave.

“See you soon,” he whispers as he shuts my door, shooting me a meaningful glance that I don’t understand.

I nod, and he disappears into the night.

Fifteen minutes later, he’s texted me that he’s home safe, so I collapse into a sleep haunted by looks I can’t interpret and blood that beads from unharmed skin.

Soon turns out to be less than ten hours. He pounces on me before I can even enter my favorite coffee nook, shoving my regular in my hands and dragging me off to our usual hammocking spot.

We’re more than halfway there when I realize he doesn’t have any hammocks. He just rolls his eyes and continues dragging me, past our four trees until we reach a valley. It’s a little one, but we are at the lowest point for at least twenty feet in any direction.

He kicks a couple beer bottles and dead joints out of the way and plops to the ground. “My frat bros party out here sometimes,” he explains. “But they’re holding a party at the house tonight, so we’re free to stay for a while.”

As if that explains anything. He isn’t answering any of my questions, so after what feels like forever, I fall silent too.

It’s only then that he starts to talk. At first, it doesn’t make any sense. They are obviously stories about us, or at least, our interactions. He talks about bloody cuffs and anxiety attacks and sudden calmness and suspicious scabs and carelessness in the shop and suddenly I understand what he is saying.

“I saw them last night.” My heavy breathing and fast heartbeat are the only things filling the air. “Your sleeve fell down. I guess that’s why you don’t own tank tops.”

I stand abruptly and walk away without looking at him.

He texts me exactly five hours later to tell me that I have to talk to him, so I reply in the simplest terms possible.

_No I fucking don’t. Leave me alone or I’m blocking your number._

It maybe isn’t the kindest or even the easiest way to deal with this, but I’m past caring.

It takes me seven minutes to uncurl from my phone. It’s another hour before I completely relax. Another hour passes before I remember that my roommate is out partying, at the party we’re supposed to be at. It’s Friday.

It’s two hours and fifty-three minutes before my phone pings again.

 _You should talk to me, though._ There’s no denying this, so I don’t respond at all.

Another five hours, and _I just want to help_ pings through.

It’s like this for a week, every five hours a text comes through. I could scroll through them to make a cohesive paragraph.

The fact that he knows me well enough to know how to approach this is scary. It’s keeping me away more than anything else, which is why it scares me, even more, when _I’ll give you time_ shows up on my screen.

I don’t want time. I want evenly spaced, predictable messages about how much he cares about me.

So even though I know he’s planned it like this, I respond _Please don’t_ and he opens my door.

“Want to play some double solitaire?” he asks. He isn’t smiling like he usually does, but he’s here and offering me companionship without any pressure.

We play for long enough for it to become difficult for me to win when I say, “it isn’t often. I haven’t... in a while. It’s not a big deal or anything. Mostly I like the way it looks.”

“You like the way it looks?!” He squawks indignantly.

“Yeah. The um. It beads up and it’s... it’s mesmerizing. You wouldn’t understand, I don’t think. It’s... complicated,” I stutter out, twisting my hands together.

He nods. “Have you talked to anyone?"

“It isn’t that I think it isn’t a problem,” I justify. “I know it’s a problem. It’s that it helps, y’know? Or.” I stop talking, biting my lip.

“I don’t know, but that’s okay. Will you promise to talk to me? When you feel the need. Even if you don’t plan on going through with it.”

And he’s been so kind and understanding that I can only agree.


End file.
